In preparation for the interim demo, there was a lot of integration testing. We constantly had to test on different track configurations, different lighting conditions and different speeds of the car. I continued to refine the detection and tracking algorithms to based on our tests and the requirements we had for the demo. A key flaw in our system seems to be the lack of memory used to predict car position. I am currently working on integrating kalman filters into the tracking algorithm to use path based trajectory to ensure more correct location of the car.
Team Status Report for 4/6/24
The most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project are color detection picking up objects in the background along with inconsistent lighting, and feed selection switching too late or switching randomly for track configurations where there is a slight overlap between camera zones or sharp bends. The first risk is being managed by further research on color detection and asking for help from people experienced in computer vision. The second risk is being managed by considering variations of the track and camera placements to test interesting edge cases of the track before choosing the final track for demo day. Contingency plans are using paint to color the cars in a solid and bright color or placing a lighting fixture or using a room with consistent lighting, and feed selection that takes more information into account instead of being very general.
No changes were made to the system.
Schedule is as shown in the interim demo.
Validation tests will involve running the car on a track/camera configuration test vector for a set amount of laps and reviewing the livestream output for metrics as defined in our user and design requirements, such as latency, smoothness, and optimality of feed choice based on what is in the frame.
Thomas’s Status Report for 4/6/24
This week I helped with integration of the motor control and feed select subsystems by adding features to the main loop which toggled whether each subsystem was enabled independently. I also improved the efficiency of system testing by adding a feature which allowed the color selection process to be restarted without restarting the whole system.
My progress is on schedule.
Next week, I hope to have a feed selection algorithm that has met certain verification requirements.
One test we will run is making sure the feed switches once the front of the car starts to come into the frame of a new camera feed. We can quantify this by looking at the first frame at which this condition is satisfied and looking at the frame the feed switches, and counting the number of frames in between. This will be done on both a circular track and 8-track.
Jae’s Status Report for 4/6/24
Given that this week was the interim demo, the days leading up to it was pretty packed with work. A lot of this has been tweaking numbers, setting up the environment, and debugging. That said, there is not much to show in terms of progress. What I personally worked on to debug was preventing the tracking algorithm from being distracted by buggy detection. Our current color detection is not the best, especially in bad lighting conditions. An ideal detection would output a bounding box for every couple frames of the feed, but our current detection outputs maybe 3-5 accurate boxes per lap. This meant that the motors had to be stable through wrong bounding boxes as well as infrequent boxes. To disallow the effects of a wrong bounding box, I set the code so that motors are only controlled when bounding boxes are within certain dimensions and locations. Because bounding boxes were not as frequent as desired, I also set the motor angle to pan multiple degrees when detecting a bounding box outside of the center of the frame. In an ideal world, this would be minimal degrees because we would have frequent boxes to keep updating.
My progress is on schedule. I have finished up the tracking task for the most part and have started debugging on integration and fine tuning the controls.
Next week, I hope to start working on tracking on the final demo track configuration.